By the time I get to the Mitre Tavern Steakhouse,
Ken Phillips
is seated at a table with a large bucket of French champagne on the black-painted window sill at his elbow. Luckily for AFR Weekend, it’s a display.

Phillips has a Corona with lime, an un-corporate open-neck shirt, and a hip pair of dark grey dress jeans. Our exchange over the choice of venue also echoed Phillips’ brand as a scourge of big unions, big government and big business.

“I don’t know the CBD restaurants at all and I’d be happy with a good pub meal," he had emailed a few days before. A mate had recommended upmarket Vue de Monde, but Phillips readily agreed when I said the Mitre Tavern had as good a pub meal as you could get. “Probably more ‘small business appropriate’," he noted.

Small business is where Ken Phillips found himself after earlier careers – as a primary school teacher and jack-of-all-trades (finance and admin) for some Italian butchers – lost their charm. It brought him success, then near-bankruptcy. And it got him back on his feet again with a portfolio career – consulting, writing and campaigning on workplace relations – that he has parlayed into a position of political influence. This week, he’s in Washington DC, spreading the gospel of small business rights.

On the website of Independent Contractors Australia – a lobby group Phillips runs “on the smell of an oily rag" – you’ll see
Bruce Billson
, then Coalition small business spokesman, embracing the ICA’s pet causes at a seminar a few weeks before the election. These include unfair contracts, Tax Office hostility to small firms and independent contractors, and the “disconnect" between the federal bureaucracy and small business.

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Seven weeks later, freshly sworn-in Minister Billson warned off the Tax Office, the Fair Work Ombudsman and the building and construction watchdog in an interview with this newspaper. The new Minister for Small Business accused them of waging a “concerted attack" on small business and independent contractors at the behest of the Labor government and unions, and withholding Australian Business Numbers, which contractors need to operate.

This was a swift return for the ICA members. Much to the chagrin of the unions – who say the ICA is a mouthpiece for Phillips and its co-founder, Adelaide homebuilder and new Family First senator Bob Day – it might be just the start.

As I excuse myself for arriving late, Phillips says some advisers in the new government have just apologised to him for having to cancel a phone hook-up. “I said: ‘That’s OK, I’ve just got my life to run, you’ve got a government to run’."

He picks a veal schnitzel, and I a 350-gram grain-fed Riverina porterhouse, with beans and broccoli. Some Yering Station merlot goes with both, and we tuck into a two-hour conversation. His schnitzel sprawls impressively across the plate, set off by bright green and purple coleslaw. My porterhouse is tasty, but closer to medium than rare.

Recurrent themes

The small business warrior and friend of the H R Nicholls society has been shaped by many forces, but some themes recur. The trials of those close to him – his father and immigrant business-folk – have tempered him. His father, who died a few months ago, studied at night and held down several jobs to advance from a typewriter mechanic in Northcote to a credit manager in Ivanhoe, in Melbourne’s northeastern green belt. Phillips Senior was working for Stanley Korman, an early corporate raider, when the credit squeeze hit in 1960. He was shortly out of a job, and Korman was later jailed over a false prospectus. Phillips recalls his father going through the jobs ads, the papers spread out on the kitchen table, and his mother – who died some years ago – ushering the kids out. He was vaguely aware of a crisis.

Later, his father got a job as a credit manager with Alcoa, and enlivened family dinners with tales of management. He introduced Ken to a businessman who’d been hurt by a long-running strike, and Ken wrote a “whole thesis" on it for his economics class at Marcellin College, a Catholic boys’ school in Bulleen.

He says of his passion for free enterprise, “I think it was something that was in me, and cultivated by dad as it came out. I think everyone in life has an X factor that then is moulded by your circumstances."

Another theme is the need for ordinary citizens to resist the usurpation of institutional power by others. Phillips taught primary school for about seven years in pre-gentrification Thornbury, found that much of what he’d absorbed at Coburg Teachers’ College didn’t help him, and learnt on the job. He recoiled from the radicals he felt had overrun the official teachers’ union, and became active in a small, breakaway union.

After about five years he hit another obstacle. Seniority dictated promotion and older baby-boomers – Phillips is 58 – had seized the heights of his chosen profession.

He moved on to the job in finance and admin at a chain of Italian butchers – “their version" of a franchise system – and the scales fell from his young primary teacher’s eyes. It was like living in a “slow moving movie", he says, as he declares the schnitzel “very good" amid the guffaws of the Friday lunch crowd.

Everyone was related to everyone else, there was money “all over the joint", isolated events made sense in hindsight. He gave the Meatworkers Union a cheque every six months – equal to the dues for the entire payroll – for a quiet life. His employers avoided the meat substitution scandal, when kangaroo and horse meat turned up as “export" Aussie beef in America, but they knew who had burned records or paid to elude capture.

Phillips learnt about retail and grass-roots business, finance, leasing, the law of contract – and how business-folk spend a lot of time with lawyers and accountants to turn black and white into grey. “I did all the legit stuff," he says. Some of the butchers worked 15- to 18-hour days, requiring “a quantity of drug-taking – uppers and stuff".

After five or six years, things got too warm – grey verged on black – and it became clear he’d have to “marry in" if he was to stay. Yet he withholds judgment. The butchers had lived through World War II as kids and teenagers, come out of dire poverty in northern Italy. “That changes people’s perceptions of life," he says

Recession brings near-ruin

Phillips put what he’d learnt to good use, building a chain of video stores and a craft shop with his wife, Margaret, a Queenslander he’d “bumped into" at the Southern Cross Hotel in Russell Street. They did “quite well". Then “Keating’s recession . . . kicked me in the teeth" in the early 1990s. They went on welfare, nearly lost the house, everything.

“It was very rough. There was a moment there one day where I thought, ‘where the f***’s the next dollar going to come from?’ and I was in the back yard crying." He was in his late 30s, with two kids in primary school. One son is now a dancer with the Polish National Ballet; the other works for Four Seasons. They rebuilt, slowly. He did “anything I could do to bring a dollar in". Margaret started a bridal jewellery business which became “quite successful".

One of Phillips’ many jobs was to get jobs for Cambodian refugees. Once again he found it humbling to work with people who’d fled horrific circumstances. One refugee, a bit of an entrepreneur, had escaped a Pol Pot camp, gathered about 10 orphans and marched over the hills to Vietnam, burying more than half of them along the way.

Like the Italians, this guy did things that were “a bit shady". But “how can I question what that person does?" He concedes that everyone needs to abide by the law, “but that doesn’t stop the understanding".

Phillips is less preoccupied by historical oppression of Australian Aborigines, arguing that every immigrant group from Irish Catholics to southern Europeans to Asians and Muslims has suffered discrimination. But he jabs his finger into the table at the idea that Aborigines living on communal land don’t have the right to buy and sell their homes because of “white paternalism" or that people who are free to buy a house and take out a mortgage can’t negotiate their own employment contract because “the big union and the system" know better. The Cambodians taught him that “the heartbeat of humanity is the desire for self-improvement which means entrepreneurship".

“I’m a fierce critic of corporations but I see the big union movement as no different," he says. Large firms – “bureaucracies" captured by senior staff – employ far fewer people in aggregate than small business, yet dominate economists’ thinking, he argues.

“If you don’t understand small business as an economist you don’t understand the economy." The idea of shovelling more cash at car maker Holden sparks another table-jabbing tattoo. “They’re just bad managers" who co-opt unions to run their shops, eroding their productivity, then run to government, he fumes. “When’s it going to stop?"

Unions – which Phillips suggests could go the way of the Masons – dispute the ICA’s claim to represent the little guy, and hint Phillips earns income from labour hire arrangements. Phillips says he earns fees, and that he was close to securing small business protection from unfair contracts from the Rudd government when the Construction, Forestry and Mining Union told them “not to deal with Ken Phillips". CFMEU chief Dave Noonan says the claim is silly, and that Phillips is conflicted because “Day is one of the biggest builders in the country".

Billson and Prime Minister Tony Abbott “get that if you don’t ... respond to small business you don’t drive the economy," Phillips says.

He is taking nothing for granted in his pursuit of unfair contract protection, dispute resolution and ABNs. Asked to reconcile that with his celebration of “freedom" and disdain for similar measures in formal employment, he says, “I am more of a socialist than the bloody unions are". Past wins include winding back the presumption of guilt in NSW health and safety laws.

It’s almost time for Phillips’ 3pm meeting, and we leave the still noisy steak-house crowd to it. His parting shot: “I strongly think that with the Abbott government, the little end of town has arrived."